CPUSA, Nat'l Cmte., March 30th – Report on the Environment

Marc Brodine, a member of the national board of the CPUSA and the chair of the Communist Party in Washington State, delivered a report on the impact of global warming, its causes and consequences.

"Global warming," he said, "is not just an inconvenient truth." Global warming has to be examined within a larger context of capitalism and other environmental problems.

"We can't have a healthy humanity without a healthy natural world," he said.

He tied environmental degradation to capitalism. Increased capitalist exploitation of nature will result in serious crisis, he said. "We can either work with nature or nature will work against us," he argued. "Capitalism is playing with the survival of humanity for short-term profit," he noted.

Climate crisis is not the only severe environmental problem facing us. Depletion of fishing, soil, and fresh water supplies, animal extinctions, the spread of disease-causing pollutants, desertification, and growing air and water pollution are among the most severe.

"Even in the best case scenario, global warming requires immediate and dramatic action," Brodine said.

Brodine insisted that political changes are required, including democratization of the political process, public policy, and economic decision-making. These changes need to happen in order to move in the right direction and to mitigate the destructive policies of the Bush administration and the worst actions off the big transnational polluters.

Immediate action is needed because global warming threatens to transform the earth's climate systems in a very short period of time and create environments that are hostile to human survival never before experienced by developed humanity.

The earth is getting hotter, but global climate change has other features: in some places more rain and more flooding; in others less rain and more drought; in some places more snowfall next to glacier melt; flooding; and so on.

It is caused by the accumulation of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere trapping the sun's heat, warming the air and the land.

This is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

"It is caused by human activity and can be slowed by human activity," Brodine said.

Social consequences include food and fresh water shortages leading to political competition for these dwindling resources.

"We can't profit our way to a solution," Brodine said. "But neither can we wait for socialism. Economic development that doesn't destroy the environment is required."

Some basic solutions are readily available but need political struggle to implement: green construction, production of hybrid vehicles, mass transit, alternative energy products like solar and wind, reduce mechanized industrial food production and increase labor-intense small agriculture, and major conservation efforts.

Brodine addressed current environmental action. "The biggest problem is not caused by individuals but by a system that privileges profit over people and nature," he said.

Capitalists are to blame for the crisis, but tend to try to shift the blame to ordinary folk, workers and the poor. They seek solutions that put the burden on us rather than on the policies and actions they take that cause the problem.

Some solutions that are being put forward by big industry are either partial solutions or untested or are very problematic steps. Biofuels, for example, drive up the cost of food or cause food shortages. "It means solving an energy problem by creating a food problem," Brodine stated.

Cap and trade schemes aren't enough.

Promotion of nuclear and "clean coal" are untested and present their own significant problems.

Brodine urged the formation of multi-issue broad-based coalitions that link environmental issues to public policy and other political struggles.

The working class, nationally and internationally, is the only force that can win and implement the changes needed.

Globally, people who contribute least global warming are paying the highest price as a result of climate change.

International reforms should include transforming international financial institutions and ending exploitative debt policies imposed on developing countries; transfer of green technology to developing countries; and implementing binding global agreements that enforce reduction of greenhouse emissions and fossil fuel usage.

Brodine pointed out that the Communist Party has a special role in winning the international communist movement to this agenda.

He urged that the environmental question be injected into all of the struggles people are involved in. The labor, youth, peace and equality movements have a significant contribution to make on the issue.

Individual actions are necessary but not sufficient to bring the change needed, he said.

Brodine proposed the expansion of the party's education on the question and the reconstitution of the party's environmental commission.

Guest Blog: The Market and Climate Change

By Marc Brodine

The second day (see first post here) of the UN NGO Conference on Climate Change continued the style of good information, good discussion, and avoiding the hardest and most fundamental economic questions. The majority of panel presenters understand, and most even say, that the market is part of the problem, that the best ways to handle basic necessities like soil, food, water, are by some form of cooperative venture combined with social decision-making.

They understand that the market, and capitalist corporations, left to themselves, cannot solve the problems posed for humanity by climate change including global warming. But they don't take the next step of seeing that a fundamental reorganization of the economy through socialism is what is ultimately required.

And there are a minority of presenters who are almost enthusiastic about private enterprise tackling global warming, about how many CEOs now see some kind of action on global warming as part of their leadership and mission. And we have to find ways to work with such people and with corporations, because we can't just wait for socialism to take action--the longer we wait, the costlier and more difficult it will be to solve these serious environmental problems. Scientific reality requires an immediate start before things get any worse.

The presenters do understand that climate change is not a separate subject form other environmental challenges--degraded soil, water scarcity, other forms of pollution besides greenhouse gases, to mention some. These challenges require linked solutions, not oversimplified linear ones focused only on carbon dioxide emissions.

This conference shows the value, necessity of, and also the limitations of the UN and its agencies. The UN set up the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has brought together world scientists and over the last decade has finally convinced all but the most rigid skeptics that global warming is real and that action must be taken. However, such forms will not reach the most fundamental conclusions about the social and economic change required.

As noted in one workshop, water issues are not simple ones, and the ways of solving them cannot be single solutions, and cannot be left to the market. There are the basic water needs of every human, the water which is a human right. There is also water that contributes to improving the quality of human life--used for sanitation, agriculture, cleanliness. And lastly there is water used for industry and business. We can't successfully treat all these kinds of water needs the same, and especially the first two kinds cannot be handled by the market in ways that are best for humanity.

Democratic participation, local control, priorities by human need rather than profit, are all needed for human solutions, and markets only use money and profit as measures, resulting in profoundly anti-human consequences.

More later on the last day.